She was only seven years old when it happened. It was in the summer, a dreadfully hot day. The breakfast dishes had been cleared off the table and piled high in the sink, flies buzzing around the table as her mother wiped it clean with a dishcloth. Edna Taylor was a large woman with an unruly head of hair which defied all attempts to keep it out of her face. Long strands fell this way and that as she cupped all the crumbs into her hand at the end of the table after a final swoop. Her seven year old daughter looked up at her from the door to the back porch, sensing that something wasn’t right. Edna looked worried and weak.
“Lizzy, go on outside and play. Your mother needs some time alone. Run along!” Elizabeth heard the tone of her mother’s voice and understood it to be an order, not a suggestion. She bounded down the back steps and ran around to the front of the house where it was cooler. She looked down the field that sloped away from the great, white salt box house that went by the name of Blue Hill. The field of brown straw, scorched by the relentless summer sun, stretched all the way to the river. Elizabeth sat herself down on a stump of a tree that had been cut down earlier in the year after it had been struck by lightening. Edna had thought it a bad omen, a sign that her sick boy wasn’t long for this world. But that was months ago, and lately Chesty had seemed to be getting better. Elizabeth sat and watched the water drifting by slowly in the distance. She heard the whistle first then saw the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad train coming up from Gladstone on the other side of the river. She could smell the smoke from the engine some days, but today the wind, what little there was, was headed in the wrong direction. Still, she watched the train until it disappeared, worrying about her mother and her sick brother.
It was just the three of them this morning. All the men were working and wouldn’t be back until lunch when the kitchen would come alive with noise and fuss as her father, three brothers and older sister came back to the house to eat. It always irked Elizabeth that her father wouldn’t allow her to go with them. “You’ve gotta stay with Momma, Lizzy. What’s gonna happen if she needs help with Chesty,” he would explain.
Chesterton Taylor had been born in 1925 and had surprised the doctors by surviving his first year, then surprised them every year since. He had been born with what they called a weak heart and wasn’t given much of a chance. The fact that he was now twelve years old had been a testament to either God’s grace or an extra helping of the famous Taylor stubbornness gene. It hadn’t been much of a life though, he having spent much of it bedridden and weak as water. Elizabeth loved him, felt sorry for him, and on some level envied him their mother’s attention, But even a seven year old knew not to admit to such a thing.
Suddenly Elizabeth thought she heard crying. Had the sound of the train drowned it out? How long had she been crying? Where was she? She ran around the house and saw her sitting on the steps holding her head in her hands, sobbing, great anguished cries of despair and heartache. Elizabeth ran up and wrapped her tiny arms around her inconsolable mother. “What’s the matter, Momma? Is it Chesty?”
Edna buried her face in her apron, wiped away the tears then lifted Elizabeth into her lap. “Chesty passed away, Lizzy. His time for suffering is finally over, he’s gone home.”
“But, this is his home,” Elizabeth cried.
“No Lizzy. This is just our earthly home.”
Thus went the strangest conversation of young Elizabeth’s short life for fifteen minutes or so as she rocked back and forth in her mother’s strong arms, not understanding but taking comfort in her odd words. Then they both saw him.
Blue Hill was a house that rested at the end of a two mile one-lane dirt road that slithered down the middle of the 700 acre farm like a serpent. To the north lay cow pastures, a couple of barns and on the highest point, the family cemetery. To the south, fields of corn and soybeans and more barns. From the back steps of the house you could see a car approaching from half a mile away, a tail of dust billowing behind it with the soft rumble of a distant engine. Neither of them saw or heard him approach. They just looked up and there he was, the morning sun shining off his white three-piece suit. He wore a white boater hat and his brown wingtip shoes looked like they had just been buffed clean. Not a trace of dust. Sitting at his feet was a Jack Russell terrier, his pink tongue bouncing up and down. Neither Elizabeth nor her mother felt any fear at the strange sight of a man in a clean suit who seemed to have arrived out of nowhere. When they looked up at him he tipped his hat and smiled down at them.
“Good morning, Mrs. Taylor. I can see you’ve been crying. What’s troubling you?”
Elizabeth had never seen a kinder smile or heard a more soothing voice. She felt warm inside as he spoke. She heard her mother’s anguished answer, “It’s my boy. He’s dead.”
The dog walked forward, jumped up in her lap, curled around and laid down. The man took off his hat as if to acknowledge their loss then said, “I know, Mrs. Taylor. I’m so sorry. It’s a terrible thing to lose a child, especially one who has been sick for so long.” He then walked over and sat down beside her on the step, he on one side and Elizabeth on the other, both holding on to her. They rocked back and forth together while the dog slept peacefully in her mother’s lap.
Elizabeth couldn’t remember how long he was there. Time was a difficult concept for a seven year old. It felt like a long time but it might have only been a few minutes. Regardless, his presence had a calming effect on her mother. She had stopped sobbing, was no longer shaking with the force of her grief. The tears had dried up by the time he left. He had stood up slowly. The dog jumped down from her lap and joined him. His parting words were simple, “The men will be back soon.” Then the two of them walked back up the road. Elizabeth watched them get smaller and smaller, noticed the dust that their feet kicked up as they walked along, saw the sun shining off his boater hat.
When her father, brothers and sister returned for lunch, they all began crying at the news. They gathered around Chesty’s bed and wept. Rosemary, Elizabeth’s only sister, was particularly distraught, draping herself over his dead body while she wailed. Her brothers mostly stood at a distance, arms crossed stiffly over their chests, eyes rimmed with tears. Her father held his filthy hat in both hands, lower lip trembling for a minute until he got a hold of himself. Then he said, “Ok, that’s enough of that,” as he gathered everyone up, led them out of the bedroom and closed the door. Edna served lunch. Everyone ate slowly, in silence. Elizabeth had never seen her family do anything quietly. They were loud people, always hollering and screaming about one thing or another, not with anger or malice, they were just loud. They spoke to each other loudly, worked loudly, even ate loudly. The clatter and tumult were an incessant part of Elizabeth’s life. Now, the seven of them sat around the long oak kitchen table so quietly you could hear the stirring of fly’s wings.
“Did ya’ll see the man wearing the white suit?” Edna asked, breaking the silence. They all exchanged glances. Her father answered, “What man?”
“You must have passed him on the road,” she insisted. “He just left us thirty minutes before ya’ll drove up. He had a little dog with him.”
“We didn’t see a man or a dog on the road. Who was he?”
Edna insisted that they couldn’t possibly have missed a man with such a sharp suit and fine dog. She told them all about his visit and as she talked they all began exchanging worried glances. Finally, Edna dropped the subject and the silence returned. Later that night when she tucked Elizabeth in bed she whispered in her ear, “Lizzy, that man was an angel sent from God to comfort us. Don’t you ever forget it, ya hear?”
And, she hadn’t. But oddly, had never bothered to share the story with her son until now, the night before he was to undergo open heart surgery to repair a faulty mitral valve. As she sat on the end of his bed regaling him with yet another creepy paranormal family secret, it occurred to Montgomery Duncan that his mother’s family history was chocked full of this sort of thing, Blue Hill being a house shot through with Gothic mystery. He made a mental note that if he survived his pending procedure, he would attempt to get to the bottom of it all. There were so many unanswered questions about the Taylors, so many odd tales. The least interesting part of this particular story was the fact that the beautiful woman sitting at the end of his bed telling it had been dead and in the ground for eleven months, having died in her sleep of heart failure herself, there being two things that prominently ran in the Taylor family, bad hearts and bedside visits from the dead. Montgomery chalked this one up to the delightful drug cocktail pulsing through his veins from the shiny IV bag beside his bed. But what to make of the half dozen other stories of premonitions, warnings and reassurance that had been provided from various dead Taylor Uncles, Aunts and Cousins through the years?
“What are you saying Ma, are you an angel sent to comfort me?”
“No. I’m just your mother.”
And with that, she was gone. Montgomery drifted off to sleep thinking about his grandmother, her dirty apron, the black wood stove in the dark kitchen, that heavy picnic style table that ran the length of the room. He pictured her turning from her cooking to see him standing at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t sleep well in the huge red bedroom upstairs, always woke up before dawn and always found her busy in the kitchen.
“Come over here, child,” she would smile. “Give your Nanny a hug.”
She would envelope him in her apron and it always smelled like sausage. She would tussle his hair then sit him down at the table and give him a hot biscuit.
“How come you always wake up so early?”
]
Montgomery never told her the truth. He never told her that Blue Hill scared the hell out of him at night. The big room upstairs was painted blood red and the only light was a single clear light bulb which hung from a long chord from the middle of the ceiling. For reasons that he didn’t understand the light always swayed a little from side to side sending shadows slithering across the walls. For a five year old boy this was the stuff from which nightmares were made. But all it took to break the spell was a visit to Nanny’s kitchen and the rising sun peaking through the screen door. For Montgomery, Blue Hill was part paradise and part haunted house. The haunting always happened at night making the arrival of the morning sun feel like paradise.
A nurse with kind eyes wearing a mask asked him to count backwards from ten. He felt a soft tingle in his arm, then a blast of cold air, then nothing. When next he opened his eyes he was hovering above the bobbing head of his surgeon looking down at the bright red blood surrounded by sky blue napkins in the middle of the table. He heard the buzz and gurgle of the ventilator and picked up parts of a conversation between the nurses about the results of a football game. Then over in a corner behind a tray of instruments he saw his mother staring intently at her son’s open chest. She was swaying from side to side with one arm raised towards heaven. This had always been how it was with Elizabeth Taylor Duncan, always turning up at the oddest times in the oddest places, always knowing something she had no way of knowing, understanding things she couldn’t possibly understand. Montgomery knew at that moment that he would survive the operation going on below. He would make a full and complete recovery. There suddenly wasn’t a doubt in his mind.
